The Movie-Going Doldrums of February

Is it just me or is February the month where movies go to die? I know that the post-holiday pre-summer period is usually lacking of anything super exciting or noteworthy, but February in general seem to be historically the month where I end up seeing the least amount of movies in theaters.

Most of that is due to there usually not many new films released that would actual interest me since studios seem to dump their throwaway films here (and the month prior). And even if there's one or two films I may want to check out (for example, this one), since my friends have taken their cue from me by also taking a short movie-going hiatus in February, I have no one to go with! I also can't begrudge them of this decision considering I would have dragged them into theaters the past few months, nearly every week, sometimes for double features.

Of course at this point the only movies I would make an effort in seeing are those nominated for Oscars just to appease the completest freak-of-nature inside of me, but as is usually the case, I would've seen most of these films already prior to the nominations and the handful of films I probably missed are either bad or difficult to track down. For example, I only need to see three films to have seen every single movie nominated in the big categories (Picture, Director, Acting, Writing). Two of them have gotten mixed to scathing reviews (War Horse, Albert Nobbs) while the other one is hard to find (A Separation). Contrast that with something like A Better Life featuring Best Actor nominee Demian Bichir or Oscar nominated documentary Hell and Back Again both of which were readily available on Netflix and which I saw this past week.

This whole thing is less of a rant and more of an observation really. In fact I'm actually quite okay to have one month off. I mean it's not like I would stop seeing movies altogether (I love you Netflix) or see my friends. In fact I may actually see them since we're not spending 2-3 hours in a darkened theater every weekend. But then again, like any movie addict, I'm already feeling withdrawal. That new Hunger Games film is less than 50 days away, right?

ETA: This is apparently my 1000th post! I didn't mean for it to be all melancholy!